Tag: data

I am pleased to announce the release of the The 2014 Craig Report (Year 44). This is my first quantified (and qualified) self report, hopefully followed by a more detailed one next year, and many more in the years to come. The executive summary is duplicated below, the details (with graphs) are in the link.

So I’m two weeks in to my mood tracking, and it’s not working out so well. When things don’t work well, you adapt (I made a T-shirt that just says “ADAPT”). So I am switching gears on the mood collection.

My first month of quantified self data collection is finished. This was data collected on my first month of getting my exercise habit back in gear. My exercise regime has been pushups, modified crunches, and bicycle riding. I took data on all three, plus my weight and my pulse before and after exercise.

I am now one week in to my new exercise habit. As usual, I am starting out small with streching, pushups and crunches. Now that it’s been one week I will ramp it up and add bicycling afterwards. But more importantly, I am also one week into my Quantified Self habit of collecting data on myself.

I screwed up at work so they have me working retail at a convention to make up for it. Our booth is like a yard sale table on the side of Rose Hill Drive, which everyone uses to drive out of the convention. I’m working there with the younger of my two sisters, my brother, and Possible Substance. It’s Possible Substance’s fault that I screwed things up at work, and I’m still mad at him.

Today was another one of those awesome days that makes me want to go out on the balcony and scream “It’s a wonderful life!” However, I don’t think my neighbors would agree with me, so I do my best to restrain myself.

I’m now entering the fourth week of working on the habit of playing with my cat Fox in the evening, So I thought I would give an update on my habit formation. In some sense it’s a bit early. Four weeks is a good time to work on an easy habit if there are no problems. However, there were some problems with this one, as I missed a couple days in the second week. However, while I am perhaps not fully trained in this habit, Fox definitely is. He knows that evenings after I work on the computer is play time. If I forget, he makes sure to remind me.

I spent Thursday and Friday evenings and most of today working on a hierarchical cluster analysis of Chess960 starting position. It’s really only a preliminary analysis, sort of a dry run to make sure that the hierarchical cluster analysis software I’ve been writing works. But I thought I’d share my methodology and results as a prelude to the real analysis, which needs some thought as to the correct approach.

The first experiment is a failed experiment. Sort of. Maybe more like a learning experiment. Last week I spent the whole week trying to code data about my life. It was a lot harder than I thought. It’s not that actually coding the data is very hard. The systems I have in place make that very easy. What’s hard is to remember to code the data. I was constantly getting somewhere and realizing I’d forgotten to log the trip, or zoning out on what I was doing and not noticing when the cat got off my lap, or forgetting something else I wanted to record. I don’t think this is really a death knell to the concept of quantifying myself, but it’s definitely going to require a rethink. The first rethink is that I should break it down into pieces (log the commute, log other travel, log evening activities, log mood, and so on). Then do them one at a time in the simple habit method. That will build me up until I’m recording everything. Given my other plans for habit formation, this means putting things off for a year or two. But hey, I’ve got another 38 left (or 108 if these guys are right).